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USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference, General Track — Abstract

Pp. 227–240 of the Proceedings

accept()able Strategies for Improving Web Server Performance

Tim Brecht, David Pariag, and Louay Gammo, University of Waterloo

Abstract

This paper evaluates techniques for improving the performance of three architecturally different web servers. We study strategies for effectively accepting incoming connections under conditions of high load. Our experimental evaluation shows that the method used to accept new connection requests can significantly impact server performance. By modifying each server's accept strategy, we improve the performance of the kernel-mode TUX server, the multi-threaded Knot server and the event-driven $ \mu $server. Under two different workloads, we improve the throughput of these servers by as much as 19% - 36% for TUX, 0% - 32% for Knot, and 39% - 71% for the $ \mu $server. Interestingly, the performance improvements realized by the user-mode $ \mu $server allow it to obtain performance that rivals an unmodified TUX server.
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